– by New Deal democrat I’ll keep today’s report on construction spending brief. The important part of this metric is residential construction spending, another proxy for housing. On a nominal basis, in March residential construction spending (red) declined -0.4%, while total construction spending (blue) declined -0.5%: These are hardly terrible declines. BUT, the price of […]
When I started teaching medical students, our MD curriculum was four years. The entire first two years were pre-clinical. Students advanced to clinical clerkships at the beginning of their third year. For seven years, I was course director for a 2.5 trimester, 95 lecture course called “Medical Biochemistry.” When I retired last July, pre-clinical training […]
May 2 and Prof. Heather has an on-target piece on the direction Trump and his team are heading. Smoke and mirrors to distort reality and install a false version of reality as the truth. Create confusion to cover up. Lie and create false scenarios. Things seem to align when you wish to quell resistance and […]
Trade Balances: It’s the Spending, Stupid by Steve Roth Wealth Economics This post is dedicated to my sister, who (bless her heart) really follows the financial press and etc. and tries to understand things. She called me up kind of flummoxed by all this tariff/trade talk recently, and now IMO has a super-good basic understand […]
The Snap cuts coming from a rather large president who over eats, just seems wrong to me. But, with this Snidely Whiplash as the President, one can be certain cuts will occur where they should not occur. My apology to Snidely, I meant Trump. Right now? Pres. Trump is thinking of cutting back on the […]
The “just in time” model is supposed to make supply chains more efficient by minimizing warehousing and storage. The current Trump tariffs are doing violence to the JIT model: “Trade experts say that companies have stockpiled enough inventory in recent months that, if the White House reverses course soon and significantly drops tariffs on China, […]
– by New Deal democrat My question over the past year had been whether “decleration” into a “soft landing”would turn into “deterioration” towards a recession. That has now been overtaken by events in the form of T—-p‘s tariffs and trade wars. So my focus now is looking for hard data, rather than reports of sentiment, […]
Similar was a part of the Red scare of the fifties when McCarthyism was the political(?) flavor of the day. The idea was to instill hysteria promulgating over a perceived threat posed to the U.S. during the Cold War. Not so much the fear of communists today. What is occurring is a range of actions […]
My brother Mike is a retired mechanical engineer. He emailed me this morning and reminded me of a New Yorker article we had both read years ago and pointed me to a fascinating youtube video that retells the story. In a nutshell, the Citicorp building in Manhattan was a triumph of architectural innovation in its […]
A book review by David Zetland, The one-handed economist. Sometimes you just want the answer Review: “Moving Pictures” This 1990 book is the 10th in the 42-book Discworld series by Terry Prachett. I’m only “reviewing” it here because Prachett has so many wonderful perspectives. The plot of the book is the (re-)discovery of cinema at Holy […]